Can We Fight Climate Change With Carbon-Absorbing Rocks? (indiatimes.com)

The New York Times reports on rocks in the country of Oman that react naturally with carbon dioxide, turning it into stone. Scientists say that if this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale -- admittedly some very big "ifs" -- it could help fight climate change. Rocks could remove some of the billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the air since the beginning of the Industrial Age. And by turning that CO2 into stone, the rocks in Oman -- or in a number of other places around the world that have similar geological formations -- would ensure that the gas stayed out of the atmosphere forever...

Capturing and storing carbon dioxide, is drawing increased interest. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that deploying such technology is essential to efforts to rein in global warming... At a geothermal power plant in Iceland, after several years of experimentation, an energy company is injecting modest amounts of carbon dioxide into volcanic rock, where it becomes mineralized. Dutch researchers have suggested spreading a kind of crushed rock along coastlines to capture CO2. And scientists in Canada and South Africa are studying ways to use mine wastes, called tailings, to do the same thing.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.

"Optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilization is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognizes he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives."

Comments

Re:More Saganesque woo

[Q-Hack!]

Actually, we are all going to die... just not from climate change.

Maybe

[Roger W Moore]

No, we can fight climate change by emitting less CO2. And that's the only way we can fight it.

That's simply not true. The best, long term solution is definitely to stop, or least reduce, CO2 emissions. However, we have a legacy of what we have already emitted and for the forseeable future we are still going to be emitting sizeable amounts of CO2. Hence, capturing and trapping the CO2 we have already emitted plus what we are going to emit is a very sensible way to fight climate change if we can do it.

What we should definitely NOT do is listen to a 86 year old social scientist making apocalyptic predictions which are unsupported by real science.

Re:Maybe

[PopeRatzo]

Have you ever stood next to a volcano?

There are maybe 1500 volcanoes that are known to have been active in the past 10,000 years. There are 1,200,000,000 motor vehicles in the world that operate day after day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Year after year.

These are vastly more powerful than a car exhaust so if we are going to abandon science how are you going to show that a car exhausts damage the environment while erupting volcanoes, forest fires etc. do not?

Nobody says they don't contribute to climate change, but volcanoes do not contribute to man-made climate change. But you change the things you can. You stop digging. You do what you can, instead of being paralyzed by the things you can't fix immediately.

For every example you can come up with there is an opposite just as "logical" counter example which is why logic is not going to help you.

Gotta be honest with you, bro: your "logic" is for shit.

Re:Maybe

[Immerman]

First Google result:

> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world's volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide.
https://www.scientificamerican...

That puts volcanoes' total annual contribution at less than 1% of the CO2 produced just by cars - which are themselves only 15% of man-made fossil CO2 emissions. So only 0.125% of human production.

Forest fires are a somewhat separate issue - globally they're estimated to release fully half as much CO2 as human fossil fuel consumption, but it's CO2 that was already in the ecological carbon cycle, which is immense but more-or-less stable (at least until temperatures tilt far enough that thawing permafrost, etc. starts releasing long-term eco-sequestered carbon). Fire's are primarily a problem when the land is then developed (construction or farming) rather than allowed to return to a similarly carbon-rich ecology so that the CO2 can be reabsorbed. Think of it as floating a water-pump fountain in a swimming pool - it circulates a lot of water, but it's all water that was already there' so the pool doesn't get any fuller. Fossil carbon is like turning on a much smaller garden hose - it's not much in comparison, but it's adding water that wasn't there before, so the water level begins to climb slowly but steadily.

Re:Maybe

[Immerman]

Yes they have - it's very a simple experiment that's been done to death. It's what started scientists being aware that there was a potential problem back in the days when "computer" was still a human occupation. Take two identical glass jars with thermometers in them, fill one with ambient air, add some extra CO2 to the other, seal them up, and put them under a lamp. The CO2-enriched jar will always warm faster, with the difference depending on just how much CO2 was added.

100% of solar radiation will eventually escape back to space - that's not a question or the whole planet would eventually melt. The question is how long the heat takes to escape, and what that does to the temperature. Every single molecule of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere slows that down slightly by absorbing outbound infrared heat photons and re-emitting them in a random direction - which means half the time they get sent back down to Earth. It's sort of like adding more blankets on a cold night: 100% of your body heat is still escaping into the room, but it's doing so more slowly, so the temperature of the blankets near you stays higher. Even tossing a single thin sheet on top of the pile will make you slightly warmer.

Meanwhile most atmospheric gasses like nitrogen (~78%), oxygen (~21%) and argon (~1%) are transparent to IR (heat) - it passes through them like they weren't there, so for the purposes of global warming they may as well not be there, they have no direct effect on heat retention. You may notice that those three alone add up to 100% - all the trace gasses combined amount to a rounding error, about 0.04%. But if it weren't for them, our planet would be a frozen ball of ice. And of the remaining trace gasses, CO2 accounts for 93.4%. It IS the stable greenhouse gas - double it, as we have, and we roughly double the number of blankets wrapped around the Earth.

Well, except for one other greenhouse gas: water. Water is where things get complicated. It's hard to measure, since its presence is constantly changing with the weather, but varies between about 0.001% and 5% (around 2% in your average rain cloud). It's the more active and unpredictable feedback system. But the average amount in the air remains fairly constant from year to year so long as the global temperature remains fairly constant. But as anyone who has lived by a large body of water can tell you - in general, the hotter it gets, the greater the absolute humidity becomes. So if global temperatures rise, the amount of water vapor in the air can be reasonably be assumed to increase a little as well, accelerating the heating. Of course water can also forms clouds, which reflect some of the incoming sunlight before it ever becomes heat, but also reflect heat leaving the ground much more effectively. So things get a lot more complicated.

Energy balance

[Solandri]

Dutch researchers have suggested spreading a kind of crushed rock along coastlines to capture CO2.

The problem is, CO2 holds the atoms at a very low energy state. So you get energy out of creating CO2, and converting CO2 into a different form usually involves putting in energy. But if that energy came from burning fossil fuels, then the second law of thermodynamics says you're creating more CO2 than you're capturing. So most of these ideas for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere involve putting even more CO2 into the atmosphere to generate the materials used to pull out the CO2.

Whether the goal is reduction of CO2 emissions, or sequestering CO2 already in the atmosphere, the solution is the same - we need to switch away from hydrocarbon-based fuels for energy. This is why decommissioning nuclear plants is extremely short-sighted. You're putting all our eggs in one basket (renewables) and gambling with the future of all life on Earth that we'll be able to develop renewable energy quickly enough before climate change reaches catastrophic levels. Why gamble when we already have a carbon-free energy source which we could ramp up within a decade or two, to provide the energy needed to power all these carbon sequestration strategies? Nuclear doesn't have to be the end-solution. We just need it to buy ourselves more time to develop renewables, then we can slowly phase out nuclear plants and replace them with renewables.

There is one way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere without us having to do anything. Plants do exactly that via photosynthesis. They take the energy from sunlight, break the CO2 up into O2 (released into the atmosphere), and lock the carbon up in a hydrocarbon chain forming sugars, starches, and cellulose. Normally that carbon is released again when the plant dies and bacteria decompose it. If we can figure out a way to seal cellulose against decomposition, then all we'd have to do is let forests grow, chop them down, seal the wood and bury it, and plant new trees to continue the process.

Re:CO2 is the only source of climate change ?

[dryeo]

Hopefully not many people think that only man affects the climate. Really it is like a river, the idea that man is the only thing that affects a rivers flow is stupid as obviously the weather has an affect. It is just as stupid to say that man doesn't affect the river as he dams it, dredges it and paves over the surrounding drainage lands. Anyone of those things can seriously affect the rivers flow. Climate is similar, we're not the only affect but we're a big one.

Re:PLANTS absorb CO2, who needs rocks?

[Waffle Iron]

... and as soon as those plants die, fungus and bacteria eat the plants and release that same CO2.

The only way that CO2 get stored for very long time frames is indeed in rocks. Typically, that involves the very slow process of sediment accumulating at the bottom of seas and oceans.

Re:I like it warm.

[Uberbah]

And every single time our earth has experienced a warm period it has been a great time to be a plant or an animal.

Every single mass extinction has happened when the environment changed too fast for life to adapt. Give polar bears 20,000 years to move and adapt, and they could change from hunting seals on ice flows to climbing trees in tropical rain forests. Give them 200 years and they'll all die. Humans will be up a shit creek as well. Yeah, it's gonna be great if you can grow bananas in Siberia. Not so great if half the world's population dies off from famine.

And for that matter we are actually in the middle of an ice-age. Yes, look it up, we are basically in an intermission smack dab in the middle of an ice-age. Heating things up taint gonna hurt a thing.

When you're climbing down a stairwell, you aren't going to get hurt if you jump a few stairs at a time. So, might as well jump off the staircase entirely and save yourself climbing down a hundred feet of stairs. Same logic.